beijing

After watching Bizzarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern so many times I knew there was a great street market where you can have some extremely weird eats. So we searched it out and made our way down there to see what delicasies we could find. The market was really neat. Beijing tours with a visit to this area will be great.It's a row of small tents with red lanterns about a block long and they serve everything from noodles and dumplings to scorpion and sea horse. Usually, travel in Beijing will be fantastic and naturally we wanted to try the weird and bizzarre foods so why not start with scorpion. It's fried up pretty good and covered with salt so it basically just taste like a potatoe chip. You definitely just shove it in there and chomp around. It's not bad actually. We got three smaller ones (the large ones were expensive) but were given one large one for free because the young lady who bought it could'nt hang. Chris proceeded to shove the large black scorpion into his mouth and ate about three quarters of it. I proceeded to finish off the rest. Not too bad. After that we ate some chow mein and some pot stickers which were very good. After walking around a little more we met a young guy from Seattle who had purchased some silk worms. There were five pods on the skewer and there were five of us so why not share the love. After watching both the guy and his lady violently spit out the insect after a few chomps I was a little hesitant but what the hell, this is why we came here. Chris went first and actually swallowed the thing which is a feat in itself. The look on his face let me know what I was in for. Now the worm has a hard outer shell which like the scorpion is fried up pretty good so it's not too terrible initially, but once you get past that you get a soft, gooey center. It reminded me a lot of a fruit snack gusher......in poop flavor. I proceeded to chomp on it to really absorb the flavor, as Zimmern would. It wasn't all that bad after the first bite or two but by the third or fourth I may have hit the intestines because the taste went from tolerable to disgusting. Fortunately there was a trash can a mere inches from me so everything left in my mouth went hurling into the can. Not very pleasant at all. That was the grossest thing we had. We ate some garlic oysters and some pork dumplings and called it a night. It was an awesome experience and one I would recommend if you find yourself in Beijing.

The next moring we left for the Summer Palace which was the "vacation" home of China's emperors. It started off with an interesting cab ride from the subway station which included two near crashes with other cars and one with a pedestrian. The latter resulted in the cabbie pulling the e-brake and coming within inches of this guy all the while sending Krista and I pummeling into the back of the seats in front of us. Good times. The Summer Palace is really quite beautiful and very large. There is a huge lake in the middle which you could rent a paddle boat on but we declined due to the price. There is a long path around the lake which we opted for. It was really nicely landscaped and the bridges were beautiful. We went into a few galleries along the way and saw some ancient artifacts that dated back to 16-11 centuries BC....that's old. The other fun part was that we were stopped about four times by locals who wanted to take pictures with us which was pretty fun. It's definitely a funny feeling to have people stop you and ask if we would pose for a photo with their child. Good times. The only thing I disliked about the Summer Palace is that there are vendors EVERYWHERE and someone is always trying to sell you something. It's like they took this beautiful place and tried to suck as much money as possible out of it. It was kind of sad.

The ride home was an interesting one as well since we were approached by this guy who offered to drive us to the nearest subway so we could get home. He ended up being just a local and we got in his car for some reason. He proceeded to pull out on the street and get into the bike lane to pass up some traffic and buses. He attempted to cut back into the normal lane in front of the bus and hit him. This was our second car accident since being in Beijing. He stopped the car and paid off the driver not to get him in trouble. Then he drove us down this crazy side street/alley saying it was a short cut to the subway. At this point we were all wondering if we had made a mistake and this guy was in fact going to rob us and drop us off in the middle of nowhere. Beijing travel service and Beijing tour guide will show you best of Beijing. Fortunately....he didn't but we learned from this and won't make the same mistake again.

So we are now off to Shanghai today. Will update again soon. Take care of yourselves